Critic Peter Howell picks the movie Roma as his favourite of 2018. Top 10 list,
The Star’s movie critic finds welcome variety in his top films of the year and those who made them
PETER HOWELL Tradition demands a Top 10 list of favourite films for the year, yet there were a lot of untraditional things about the movies in 2018.
It was a year that set a box-office record — the final tally will be close to $11.8 billion (U.S.) — even as industry pundits fretted about a terrible summer and the threat posed to theatrical exhibition by Netflix, Amazon and other streaming giants. Disney had the top three money-earning films of 2018
— Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War and Incredibles 2 — but it also had three of the year’s biggest flops: A
Wrinkle in Time; Solo: A Star Wars Story; and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, all of which had been expected to do far better than they did.
There was welcome diversity in many of the films that made the greatest impact at the box office or through critical acclaim or both. The predominately Black cast of superheroic Black Panther and the nearly all-Asian cast of rom-com Crazy Rich Asians represented breakthroughs for people not well served by traditional Hollywood fare. Is the diversity message finally getting through? Here’s hoping.
As awards season heats up — Oscar nominations will be announced Jan. 22 — there are an unprecedented three films by Black directors deemed to be in the hunt for a Best Picture nod, out of a potential 10 nominees: Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther; Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman; and Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk.
All three have a spot either on my Top 10 or runners-up lists for the year, along with Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You. My picks also include five films directed or co-directed by women: Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum; Jennifer Baichwal’s Anthropocene: The Human Epoch; Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?; Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace; and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here.
One other fact worth noting is the continuing value of film festivals, even in these days of inhome digital distractions. Of the 20 films in my Top 10 and runners-up lists, I first saw all but three of them — Annihilation, Black Panther and The Favourite — at the Toronto, Cannes or Sundance film fests. Let us proceed: 1. Roma Alfonso Cuaron’s neo-realist B&W masterpiece, set in the early 1970s, salutes the women who raised him while also cogently commenting on turbulent times. It’s as intimate as Cuaron’s road reverie Y Tu Mama Tambien, as expansive as his cosmic trip Gravity and as momentous as his nightmarish Children of Men, yet it makes an impact all its own. Roma’s title and location summon the Mexico City neighbourhood of Cuaron’s youth, where he was cared for by a nanny named Libo. She’s lovingly recalled by Cleo, an Indigenous maid and nanny affectingly played by first-time actor Yalitza Aparicio. A story of strength and compassion in the midst of inhumanity, Roma brilliantly bridges past and present, good times and bad. It’s the movie of the year. 2. Burning South Korea’s Lee Changdong ( Poetry, Secret Sunshine) lights a fire with this slow-reveal mystery that gets at populist rage by way of incendiary metaphor. A stunner in form and content, it’s a Hitchcockian suspenser that looks going in like a love triangle between three millennials of disparate status: poor country kid Jongu (Yoo Ah-in), rich city brat Ben ( The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun) and free-spirited mime artist Hae-mi (Jun Jong-seo). Working from an enigmatic short story by Japan’s Haruki Murakami, director/co-writer Lee pieces together his puzzle with symbol-laden commentary on the growing discontent he perceives among young people, men in particular. Left with limited life choices, they view the world through eyes ablaze with fury. 3. Capernaum An absolute heartbreaker. Bravura filmmaking by Lebanon’s Nadine Labaki, whose Where Do We Go Now? won TIFF’s People’s Choice Award in 2011. Titled for a biblical town where Jesus Christ is said to have performed healing miracles, Capernaum follows 12year-old Zain, played by Syrian actor Zain Al Rafeea, who has a face out of Italian neo-realism and the heart of a lion. Bereft of proper parental care, Zain struggles for freedom and life on the streets of Beirut. He’s watching over a toddler sibling and also trying to protect a threatened younger sister, who has been sold into what amounts to marriage slavery. Zain hopes there are still a few miracles left in a city where no documents means no humanity. (Opens in Toronto Jan. 11.) 4. Green Book The year is 1962, the location is the Deep South and the fact-based story inspires and delights, making this Peter Farrelly comedy the deserved TIFF 2018 Audience Award champ. Don “Doc” Shirley (Mahershala Ali) is a virtuoso Carnegie Hall pianist and cultural snob. Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) is a fasttalking and fist-swinging Bronx hustler. Naturally, they’re in a car together, with Tony driving Doc on a southern road trip where the times are not a-changin’ regarding racial attitudes. Farrelly has fun with stereotypes but he also explodes them. Ali and Mortensen, superb actors both, create fully realized characters who come to know each other in a way that can be summed up with an immortal Aretha song title: “R.E.S.P.E.C.T.” 5. Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
There’s fierce beauty in the films of Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas de Pencier, as they travel the world with an artful lens that makes human constructions seem awe-inspiring from a distance. The close-up truth? People are depleting the Earth with ever more efficient methods of extraction and pollution that threaten the new mass extinction of the film’s title. Grim superlatives abound: we see the world’s largest excavating machines, straight out of a sci-fi nightmare, gobbling German farmland; Africa’s largest garbage dump, near where 750,000 people live; the mostpolluted city in Russia, Norilsk, where kids ride bikes near oil and chemical plants; and more such horrors. Mankind is busily choreographing its own destruction. 6. Black Panther The Marvel Cinematic Universe takes moviegoers to many wonderful places, but it turns out the most fascinating one is on Earth: Wakanda, in Africa, a fictional paradise brought to the big screen by director/cowriter Coogler ( Creed, Fruitvale Station). Chadwick Boseman plays the title protagonist, a grieving prince sworn to protect his country and its otherworldly resource vibranium, which has made this small nation unbelievably wealthy and technologically advanced (spaceships are a common conveyance). Vibrant allies, among them Wakanda’s all-female security force, and fascinating villains, especially Michael B. Jordan’s righteously motivated Killmonger, help make Black Panther the best superhero movie of recent times. 7. First Reformed Writer/director Paul Schrader masterfully tells stories of existential crisis, which he deepens here with genuine concern about global warming. Ethan Hawke is his most excellent avatar, quietly expressing the pain of a man torn between forbearance and extreme measures in the face of a great wrong. The fictional church of the title is in upstate New York, a house of worship with gleaming white pews that belie the 250 years it has borne witness to Calvinism. It’s a crucible of secrets, and Rev. Ernest Toller (Hawke) has some of his own, which he elects to explore through whisky and a daily journal. Multiple challenges, among them a pregnant widow (Amanda Seyfried), put Toller to the test and make First Reformed superlative drama. 8. BlacKkKlansman Spike Lee does the right thing with BlacKkKlansman, the strange-but-true story of Black cop Ron Stallworth, who infiltrated the Colorado chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Set in the late 1970s but informed by the here and now, it’s scathing humour fuelled by righteous anger against racial hatred and anti-Semitism. Stallworth’s autobiography forms the narrative backbone of a script cowritten by Lee with his Chi-Raq screenplay partner Kevin Willmott, as well as producers Charlie Wachtel and David Rabinowitz. With John David Washington, Adam Driver and Topher Grace leading a sterling cast, the film is Lee’s best and most commercial movie in a dozen years — since Inside Man, which starred Washington’s dad Denzel. 9. The Favourite We’re in exceedingly good company in this period farce by Yorgos Lanthimos, if by “good company” we mean folks who would sooner shoot you than break bread with you. They’re extremely witty about being catty, you see, especially the main vixens of this period farce, set in the English court of the early 18th century: Olivia Colman as Queen Anne, a morose monarch who is by turns bulimic, tragic and randy; her scheming assistant/lover Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), whose most telling quote is “Let’s shoot something!”; and Sarah’s cousin Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), a social climber currently at the bottom of the ladder who will soon turn a twosome into a threesome and make All About Eve look like amateur hour. 10. Sorry to Bother You If you saw just one comedy/ drama/freakout this year, Sorry to Bother You had to be it, even if you didn’t quite understand what it was about. Is the film a caustic racial satire, calculated to offend the entitled? Or is it a zany comedy about the downtrodden 99 per cent versus the upwardly scheming 1 per cent? Yes and yes … and stay tuned. Rapper-turned-writer/ director Riley’s feature debut is both of these things, until it takes a turn toward something altogether stranger. Get Out’s Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Yeun, Armie Hammer, Danny Glover and Omari Hardwick star in this gonzo amusement, which surfs genres and happily defies its own interior mantra: “Stick to the Script.” RUNNERS-UP (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER): Annihilation A Star Is Born Can You Ever Forgive Me? Cold War Eighth Grade Hereditary If Beale Street Could Talk Leave No Trace Shoplifters You Were Never Really Here